Encephalon
by Dahne
Summary: A psychic research session on a slow day offers some unexpected insights. Something of a character study. Mentions of VolginRaikov.


Interesting._ Interesting.  
_

Of all the euphemisms for psychokinetic abilities Mantis had encountered over the years, he had found "second sight" to be the most unwittingly accurate, especially in a postmortem case such as this. Thought was not invisible; it left its mark on the mind, indelible paths worn through the brain's neural conduits. The telepath's gift was, at its core, merely that of making these paths visible and, from there, modifiable, if only momentarily. Even when the animate sparks that forged these paths had been long extinguished, much could be learned from them of the person to whom they had belonged. Oh, much indeed.

The preservation was astonishing. According to the records, this specimen - Yevgeny Borisovitch Volgin, as had been neatly printed across the top of the briefing sheet - had met his end with a great deal of violence, a statement which the first cursory reading only affirmed. The upper layers of consciousness dealt almost exclusively with warfare. Such was to be expected. Mantis had wondered why he had been told to investigate such a person, who had been involved in events so long past, but his superiors had little love for straight answers and hid as always behind that exasperatingly solid mental shielding. Initially, he had suspected that this might be something to keep him occupied between missions precisely in order that he not concentrate his attentions on probing that shielding, but soon enough he became interested despite himself in this new project.

The records provided sparse details, but those were enough to give Mantis a clear idea of what to expect. A man of astonishing brutality, a murderer and torturer. He knew the kind. Such was the one whose mind he had reached just that shade too deeply into so many years ago. Yes, he knew them. Shattered, twisted paradoxes, neural networks snarled into cat's-cradle monstrosities, the wires snapped and bent and firing wild, erratic sparks to uneasy purpose. They had a hideous beauty to them, the arrestive power of a gorgon's glimpse caught in shards of ruptured mirror.

At the very first glance everything was wrong. Here was no fevered jungle of reasonless neural growth, no jutting spikes or erratic angles. Here were ordered, meticulous garden plots, each demarcated and defined with a rigidity that bordered on the ludicrous. Even those most cultivated 'normal' minds into which he had delved contained some irregularities, some patches of weeds, to speak metaphorically. Here were none. Every slip of the ranks between categories of thought had been ruthlessly pummeled back into place, by force of what Mantis suspected to be nothing but sheer willpower. Accosted by a sudden curiosity, he abandoned his usual routine of investigation to peer more closely at those areas concerned with morality.

Oh, _interesting.  
_

What he should have seen was a ruined wasteland. A scene of devastation, with what parts weren't corroded to the point of unrecognizability gone outright. Yet it was not. Here, encoded in the depths of the mind of this sociopath, this maniac rampant, was the most unflinchingly stringent moral code Mantis had ever seen.

Interesting indeed.

Mantis intensified his focus. Black and white. Yes, that was the key, at least part of it. This man had divided the external world as savagely as he had the internal. There lay the enemy, aligned with the wrong side and therefore fair game as an outlet for the lunatic violence coiled within him. There were the soldiers, every thought and action towards them concerned exclusively with goading them to best fulfill their purpose. And there was-

Well, now. That explained the unusual alterations in the genetic drive. This bore further investigation.

Mantis shifted his attention to the great banks of memory. The search was brief; the memories relevant to his interest comprised a significant portion of the central vaults, the placement emphasizing the importance granted them by the host. Taking care that his control stayed firm, Mantis eased his mind close enough to let the experiences stream across the interval to play out before him, though always keeping distance sufficient to prevent any threat to his egress. That was a mistake he had made only once. The memories flashed, projected onto the surfaces behind his eyes.

_ A new promotion. The sound of heavy boots echoed against steel walls. What? This boy was barely more than a child. Almost too pretty, in fact, to even be called a boy. Well. One way to be sure of that. _

_There was a certain, select variety of expected ways to react to a very large, very intimidating man seizing none too gently a rather delicate portion of one's anatomy. It was not counted among them to gaze unperturbed into the face the assailant and remark mildly, "you know, some people consider it more polite to just shake hands."  
_

Flash.

_ Nightmares, a gift from younger days. Days of terror, pain, confusion, as the current awoke within him and made itself manifest, lashing outward and inward in adherence to no logic but its own arcane will_. _Days before he had learned, down to the core of his neural fibers, that the answer, the means of conquering the force that carved crimson tracks across his face in the shape of his scream and converting the torrent, purifying its erratic strikes against himself and his surroundings into a weapon against his enemies, the divine secret, was control. Dreaming of those days, and dreaming of rain. Dreaming of hurting, shouting, convulsing, until cool hands soothed him and drew him close, and only later in the light seeing the fierce red lines drawn by unconscious discharge across pale, unguarded flesh.  
_

Flash.

_Anger, and the thick smell of blood. Someone had hurt his Ivan. Impact. No one was ever to hurt his Ivan. Crackling. A choked noise. Never. _

Flash.

_ Morning, warmth against him, softness under his hands. A murmur. "Love you."  
_

Moreover, it was true. Naked neurochemistry possessed no means of deception. How very strange, that one mind could encompass such incongruous emotions, such directly discordant motivations. What could have possibly brought about such an unnatural partitioning of the network?

It was in the memories that he found the answer. Not by sieving through the content, contrasting the fervor of battles viewed through a haze of sweat and adrenaline with the unearthly calm of the stolen moments afterward, coarse fingers wreathed in scars against those pure as a child's. Not by minute examination, but by pulling back to a wider vista, glimpsing the greater pattern etched across the panorama. Slowly, with ponderous wonder, it dawned on Mantis, the reason behind this fragmented yet unflinchingly meticulous mind.

Simple engineering! His eyes dilated in fascination. Yet he had dismissed it out of hand, the electric current it was said ran through this man's body, ignored it except as another example of the curious trait people had of accepting anything as long as it was unbelievable enough, engaging the instinctive coping mechanism of, when faced with something of such outlandishness that it could not possibly be integrated with a sane worldview unless it came equipped with a detailed, satisfying explanation, retroactively editing itself to assume that such an explanation actually had been offered. It was one of the brain's innumerable methods of preserving sanity in the face of as unbalancing a concept as reality.

The ways it could adapt! Incredible! Now that he looked more closely at the purely physical aspects, the damage was obvious. The current had leapt unbound throughout the networks, wreaking havoc upon both the means of creating memory and the stores themselves, severing ties and fusing wires, until it had been restrained. The process had blanked out swathes of preexisting data, and had interfered with the creation of new for a matter of more than a year. This physical effect in combination with the raw personality and the manner in which it had developed - yes, it was so clear now!

By the time the effects upon his recollective functions had waned and finally vanished, he had learned that his memory was not to be trusted. In order to know his own actions, he would have had no choice but to rely upon the testimony of others. He could not trust his own mind. Down in the depths of his psyche, the shadowy places, interwoven with those that govern breath and eyelids and beating heart, upon which the entirety of the structure depends, his ego faced crisis. He had had no choice. So he had created one.

It was truly amazing. He was utterly dependant on his concept of self. When the foundations of his knowledge of that self were threatened, he had responded by reshaping it so that it was _unconditionally knowable ._ Thus the structure, the meticulous delineations. Thus the adamant morality; it was essential to him that he know without the merest hint of doubt what he would in absolute truth _never do_ . And all decided in the space of a moment, without any notice from the conscious mind.

Ah, the human mind! From his first moment of awareness he had studied it, sunk his hands into its folds, its fears and strivings and hatreds, and yet still it surprised him with the sheer diversity of its inventive capacities, the lengths and depths it would go to in devotion to self-preservation. Never before had he encountered this sort of unconscious technique, this means of protecting the nature of the fabric by drastically altering the pattern it wove. The things his superiors, already so skilled in their harsh arts of mental manipulation, could do with such knowledge...

The thought of his purpose in this examination quickly diluted the heady liquor of new discovery that had coursed through him. They gave him these occasional research assignments in order that he might learn things that could be useful to them, hand them tools to use in shaping their omnipresent armies and esoteric purposes. Weapons development. The strength summoned to shelter and sustain a self would be used to manufacture sheaves of pliant homunculi. Though Mantis had long ago ceased cataloging the cruel and bitter ironies of life for lack of further shelf space, it bothered him, to be reminded of his continuing position of servitude in such a way. Not to mention whom he served. Even identical genetics produced a vast assortment of divergent products, equipped with a full array of personal aspects that there was no method to predict or control. There was so much they did not understand of the mind's workings, from where it drew its sustenance and why it developed as it did in the care of its possessor. What if, Mantis thought suddenly, they did? A herd of minds gone blank, the crevices and twists and hidden folds all gently but insistently smoothed away. A symphony robbed of the discord that gave it dignity. That was their goal, distant as it may be. They were patient, and they made full use of every tool given them. A pity. It really was a pity.

_Case No. 655321-YBV_

_Subject shows signs of common sociopath, e.g. violence, disorganization. Much obscured by extreme means of death. No further study req.  
_

Mantis affixed his signature and laid the report atop the stack with the rest. _There,_ he thought. _Your strange code shall remain yours. You've earned your secret. Who am I to take it from you?_ There were some things, he reflected as he made the arrangements to reseal the remains, that you just didn't do.

* * *

Notes: 

The idea for this grew from a conversation on the mgsslash livejournal community about Volgin. I know he's a psychopathic son of a bitch, but for some reason I got the idea that there was more than one dimension to his psychopathic son-of-a-bitchery. So this is just a bit of a study of the character as I see him, from the point of view of the guy who taught me that your soul is in your memory card and the future is just a controller port away.

Does it make it less pretentious if I admit that I learned the word 'homunculus' from Valkyrie Profile?

The case number is a reference so obscure that I'll be floored if anybody gets it, but it seemed appropriate.

-It's pretty damn overblown prose, I know. Though, I can't imagine Mantis as being an awfully social fellow, so he sort of came out as someone with a sort of secretly poetic bent to his private thoughts.

I actually did some research for this. I found that recipients of electric shock therapy often experience problems with memory. But really, there's a disturbing shortage of information out there on the physcial effects of being endowed with lightning magic.

Funny, how Raikov exists solely to have his clothing stolen and be shoved in a locker, yet he sprang into my head with an entire, fully-developed personality for no real reason.

Obligatory: Please review, for I am a veritable constructive criticism lady-of-the-evening.


End file.
